This invention relates to telecommunication networks and, more specifically, to providing ring back services to user devices in a cable network.
In a traditional wireline or wireless telephone system, ring back is the audio sound sent by a switch to the telephone of the calling party prior to call path connection to a called party. Such traditional ring back consisted of periodic tones used to convey to the calling party that the telephone of the called party was ringing.
Because an Internet Protocol (IP) Multimedia Sub-System (IMS) utilizes packet networks instead of traditional wireline circuit-based networks, ring back has to be generated and provided by other than a telecommunication switch. A known method of generating the ring back tones is local generation of the tones at the calling party equipment, upon receiving an appropriate signal from the network; however, the end-user's experience in such cases is limited to experiencing from one of the finite pre-stored ring back tones on the end-user device. Another known method of providing ring back in an IMS uses a Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) “Alert-Info” messaging. This functions as a client pull technique where the calling party is the client and the IMS is the network from which the ring back information is pulled by the client.
However, methods of providing ring back in an IMS network may not be directly applied for use in a cable network. With the increasing use of cable networks for telephone type services, there is thus a need in the art for an implementation of customized ring back in cable networks.